12/22/2009

It
is difficult not to be disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change
Summit. Expectations had been high for so long with the urgency and scale of
the issue and because, at long last, of the involvement of the United States
in the event. The failure seemed all the worse given that, these days, we’re
often told we mustn’t fail. We’re used now to working all hours on projects
until they’re complete and being told we need to stay in countries we’ve invaded
‘until the job is done’. There seemed no reason for the event to end without a
result. Why couldn’t they stay on until they reached agreement? What else did
they have to do that was more Urgent/Important in their little priorities
matrix? The determination and speed at which the banking system was bailed out
in 2008 doesn’t seem to be on offer to the planet as a whole.

Perhaps
the agreement Obama worked on with China,
India and South Africa
will start move things. It is irritating for the US (or Europe) to lecture China
on reducing emissions when so much of it comes from manufacturing products
imported by western corporations to sell to western consumers. This exporting
of pollution by the west to developing countries is a ‘market failure’ aspect
of globalisation as much as the toxic debt that has crippled the world economy
and exposed neo-liberal self-regulation ‘certainties’. Equally, I can’t
understand how China,
with a significant leadership position in the G77, will explain its reported
refusal to move to an agreement to the rest of the group who have pressed for
reductions by major economies.

It
is depressing. However, although it’s taken over 30 years for the issue of
climate change to be seriously debated, I do think that Copenhagen shows that governments are taking
it seriously now. To some extent, 2009 has been characterised by people
recognising that we can’t wait for, or rely on, politicians and we need make
changes ourselves, in our homes, communities and workplaces. After all, we are
the consumers and I suppose I’m not alone in wondering how I’ve managed to know
about this stuff for so long and do so little about it personally. The 10:10
campaign, so far, has been brilliant in making a huge and demoralising issue
more manageable, personal and showing it’s possible to act in any organisation.

Last
year the WEA we made ‘Promoting Sustainability’ one of nine strategic
priorities for the period to the end of 2013. We’d made some small steps about
it early this year but moved forward more quickly with a ‘Forum for the Future’
Masters Scholar placement attached to the WEA for four weeks in the early
autumn. Steven Bland worked with us and, as part of a very busy month, gave us
the impetus to sign the WEA up to the 10:10 Campaign. Steven surveyed the views
of over 10,000 WEA members, 2700 tutors and 600 staff and we had an
overwhelming confirmation of the importance of this issue to people involved
with the WEA. Usefully, this survey (the biggest mass e-mail the WEA has
undertaken to date) has led to 600 people asking to be part of an e-mail
network on Promoting Sustainability across the WEA. Incidentally, it also makes
you realise what can be done in four weeks by someone with energy and
enthusiasm. Steven’s work had far more impact, resonance and reach into the
organisation than an army of consultants could have brought.

So,
we’re readying ourselves for 10:10; getting our benchmarks in place. The 10%
reduction will be tough and that’s why we wanted to be confident it was
something that colleagues across the organisation would support. The WEA is a
very dispersed organisation using hundreds of venues in communities and
neighbourhoods across the country, with thousands of tutors and tens of
thousands of students (one reason why the dismal Framework for Excellence ‘learner
views’ survey is difficult to promote). We still involve our students and
partners in determining the courses we run. We don’t control the energy use of
most of our venues and we do have tutors travelling by car some distance to
where they teach. On the other hand, the students have shorter journeys because
our provision is so local and our classes improve the utilisation (and
viability) of many community venues.

The
relationship to the curriculum is more tricky than the organisational energy
issues. Over the year, I feel that the issue for the WEA is how to share ideas
and gain encouragement from each other so that sustainability and the personal
and organisational responsibility it involves become a permitted and evident
part of the Association’s work.

In
honesty, we are only beginning to look to ways that the small number of courses
and activities the WEA already runs on these issues can be linked up and tutors
who are involved can share and develop their practice and the WEA can learn
from them. However, I’m pretty convinced that this can’t be a centralised,
micro-managed initiative. We’ll need some measures for our organisational
impact and we’ll need to monitor how we’re doing but, more than that, we need
to make this a permitted, encouraged and – possibly - celebrated (but not in a
marketing/PR/ ‘let’s look at the communication plan’ sort of way) thread of
activity.

It’s
been quite striking to see how difficult a fit this is for the WEA. I suppose
that’s true for all 10:10 signatories. Our finance system isn’t set up to
account for our CO2 ‘expenditure’ and Sector Subject Areas don’t
generate the kind of data evidence for this work that we’ve been so encouraged
to see as the measure of ‘success’ in the world of post 16 regulation and
improvement. Moreover, the other stuff still keeps coming: new agencies,
funding audits, procurement, ‘new professionalism’, revised inspection
approaches - all the hyperactivity and churn of the last decade zooms past the
collapse of part-time adult learning opportunities and the warming planet.
Perhaps this issue can be the one where we say this is too important to leave
to be directed from the superstructure to meet its ‘deliverables’.

In
some ways, although I really hope we can progress with the development of the
curriculum in a conventional sense, I’m more interested in the possibility that
promoting sustainability can be a thread running through – and changing - all
our provision. ‘Think Global, Act local’, is an idea that feels fairly modern
and yet was coined by Patrick Geddes almost 100 years ago. He also talked of ‘place,
work, folk’ and, in education, ‘head, hand, heart’. These ideas together seem a
good basis for thinking and taking action for sustainable learning and local
future.

I
admire all the efforts being taken by people and communities taking action on
sustainability and climate change through 10:10, transition towns etc. and I hope
that the WEA can contribute to these actions in 2010 and beyond.

10/26/2009

The WEA's nine strategic priorities include one on 'Promoting Sustainability'. When the 10:10 campaign was announced many in the WEA wanted the Association to sign up straight away. We didn't then, partly because reducing 10% of emissions in 2010 is going to be pretty hard and mostly because hardly anyone involved in the WEA would have been involved in that decision.

We were lucky because we were just about to have a one month placement of a Masters student from Forum for the Future to help us sharpen up our plans for this priority. Steven Bland worked with us for a month and talked with many people across the WEA. In particular, he led an online survey of the views of WEA staff, tutors and members - the biggest survey we've ever done. Out of over 13,000 people we e-mailed we had a high response rate and over 600 respondents agreed to continuing to stay in touch on this issue in the WEA. It also gave us a clear mandate to sign up to 10:10 with over 56% of members, 63% of tutors and 61% of staff in favour and no more than 8% against in any of these groups.

So, we are asking WEA Trustees to sign the Association up to 10:10 and all it involves.

07/22/2008

This week has seen the launch of a publication by the 'Green New Deal Group' which starkly addresses the key issues many of us worry about but often put to one side when faced with vital and well constructed initiatives to transform education to meet the needs of employers and the economy.

Perhaps the issues raised here are the 21st century version of the issues that brought the WEA into being.

The report is available from the New Economics Foundation http://neweconomics.org/gen/

I copy the foreword here:

"This report is a call to wake up to the scale of the menace posed to the naturalworld, the global economy and all our livelihoods by a triple crunch: the presentglobal financial crisis, climate change and the rapid depletion of oil.

To develop innovative, sound solutions that will deal with the gravity of this triplecrunch we have convened a group of ‘new economists’ whose backgrounds rangefrom the City, to the oil industry and the labour and environmental movements. Weset out to envision a different future, and propose policies for renewal. This reportis the result. It is a call for a radical transformation in the financial and economicmodel that has fuelled these crises. In it we propose a Green New Deal.

As our executive summary suggests, the Green New Deal is designed to addressthese great threats confronting society and restore stability to our financial, politicaland ecosystems.

In doing so, we hope to correct a number of critical oversights. These include theways in which environmentalists have tended to neglect the role of the financesector and economic policy; how those involved in industry, broadly defined, havefailed to grasp the malign effects of the finance sector on the overall economy; andhow trade unionists have for too long ignored financial and environmental concerns.We hope that the publication of this report will help bring these diverse social andindustrial forces together, leading to a new progressive movement. We believethat our joint signatories point to an exciting possibility of a new political alliance:an alliance between the labour movement and the green movement, betweenthose engaged in manufacturing and the public sector, between civil society andacademia, industry, agriculture and those working productively in the serviceindustries.

Such a political alliance is vital if we are to challenge the dominance of the financesector in the economy, its threat to the productive sectors of the economy, itscorruption of the political system, and its corrosion of social and environmentalvalues.

By proposing a Green New Deal, this report acknowledges the limits to ourecosystem; that ‘the biosphere that supports us is finite, non-growing, closed andconstrained by the laws of thermodynamics’, as the environmental economistHerman Daly put it.

The Green New Deal promotes ‘joined-up thinking’ about the four systems thatdominate our world: the market, the state, civil society and the ecosystem. We hopethat it will lay the basis for a radical transformation and renewal of our financial,political and ecosystems."

Is this an alliance that the WEA should be engaging with and a debate that staff, tutors, volunteers and students would want to join?